On-going Research

The Digital Turn in Environmental Governance: Insights from the energy and agri-food systems (DEMO)

Project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation. PIs: Zora Kovacic and Lucía Argüelles.

The EU is betting its future on the twin digital and green transition. The European Green Deal refers to the green and digital “twin transition” and defines digital technologies as “a critical enabler for attaining the sustainability goals of the Green Deal”. Overlapping with the deployment of the European Green Deal, the digitalisation of life has been accelerated by the COVID19 pandemic, along with changes in how we work, study, or access the health system, among others. It is not trivial that one of the four axes of the Spanish Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan (Plan de Recuperación, Transformación y Resiliencia), designed to address the COVID19 pandemic impacts, is the digital transformation of the economy and society, a transformation that is to be “humanist and inclusive”. This strategy is transversal to many sectors included in the plan, including education, tourism, industry, and mobility. The digital transformation is paired in importance with the ecological transformation, another axis of the Plan.

Yet, how those two spheres (i.e. the digital and the ecological) are or ought to be connected has not been spelled out. In this accelerating turn towards the digital society and economy, it is urgent to understand how the ‘twinning’ of the digital and the ecological transitions takes place, redefining environmental governance. Consequently, the project DEMO (the Digital turn in EnvironMental gOvernance) will examine the redefinition of environmental governance within digital energy systems and digital agri-food systems in Spain, by looking at digital practices and imaginaries around environmental policies from the lens of Science and Technology Studies and political ecology. The ultimate aim of DEMO is to generate a deeper understanding of the sustainability of digital environmental governance, contributing to the improvement of public policies for energy and agri-food systems.